Recovery - The Medical Model Continued

Last week I began scavenging my upcoming Mental Illness Awareness Week presentation Recovery: Rewiring the Brain for a series of blog posts. I left you in the middle of the Medical Model. The graphic is on the left. The narrative left off as the person with the broken brain was reading the patient information sheet, gulped at that list of side effects, remembered the doctor said she should weigh her costs and benefits, and then discovered that, according to the patient information sheet, the doctor had already done the weighing for her, and all she had to so was swallow the damn pill.

The Chemistry Experiment

The way it actually happened was this. The sixth antidepressant my doctor wanted to try, she
said, I get really good results with this medication.

So I wanted to know, remembering the results I got from her last brilliant idea, or rather, from the samples she had just received from the last sales rep, What kind of results will I get?

And she said, We won’t know unless we try it.

You know, you want to believe what the sales reps say. And indeed, for some people, these meds have
changed their lives.

But, honest to God, and I am quoting Dr. Ken Duckworth,
NAMI’s (National Alliance on Mental Illness) medical director, if these meds really worked as well as promised, NAMI
would have gone out of business a decade ago.

The pharmaceutical companies are no longer trying to develop
new drugs with new promises, because National Institute of Health won’t fund
the clinical trials. (Clinical trials are when they give some people the poison pill and some people the sugar pill, and measure whether their scores change on the symptom check list.)

Rewrite Your Research Grants

NIH now makes grants for basic research into the causes
of serious mental illness, in the hope that when we understand the underlying
neuropathology, not just what the chemicals do to the symptoms, we may find new
treatments that really do restore people to full functioning. We have new tools, brain imaging, the human
genome project. It’s time to start
again.

Anyway, hope springs eternal. Maybe there is a silver bullet out there.

In the medical model, elimination of symptoms leads to
recovery, full functioning, normal life. The people for whom this model works, who take their pill in
the morning and are good to go, frankly are very, very fortunate.

And I do not begrudge them their good fortune. I can name fourteen meds I have tried in my
intense desire that taking a pill would give me my life back.

But I have not received my intense desire. And you may know or you may be another
whom this model has helped, but we simply can’t climb to the top of the ladder.

The Recovery Model

So next week, we will tell this story again. The second version was developed by people
who have a mental illness. It
offers a different understanding of recovery and how we get there.

Again, you start with the broken brain. You take it to the doctor. You ask, What the heck happened?...